


Colder Than Hell

by venividivictorious



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Chloe Loves Her Devil, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Hell Trauma, Light Angst, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Needs A Hug, Post-Coital Cuddling, Season/Series 05, Sharing Body Heat, Sharing a Bed, Sleepy Cuddles, and he gets one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 04:41:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26347276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venividivictorious/pseuds/venividivictorious
Summary: Lucifer readjusts to the cooler climate in Los Angeles. Chloe helps.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 53
Kudos: 441





	Colder Than Hell

Earth is colder than Hell. 

That's probably obvious, from the whole "fire and brimstone" image of the place. The bloody place gets more fire imagery than he does -  _ burning in Hell, hotter than Hell, fires of Hell,  _ and whatnot. So it ought to stand to reason - him being an awfully clever Devil and all - that, after however many eons of sneaking topside for a nice little vacay,  _ he'd bloody remember that Hell is hotter than Earth _ . 

It gets him every time, going from the sweltering bollock-sweat-and-body-odour torridity of the Pit to the balmy body-friendly warmth of SoCal. 

LA. Home. 

No. Not home, not anymore. Hell is home. He can't afford to...can't get bogged down in sentimentality. This is a pitstop. He's only going to be topside long enough to fix bloody Michael's bloody mess, and then he'll have to go back below. 

He pays the Uber driver with a roll of Bens pulled from the inside pocket of his suit jacket - nice boy, wants to open a bakery, and bloody hell but it's good to speak to someone with an interest that isn't fighting or fucking - and gets out onto the sidewalk outside the precinct. 

Sunlight washes over him as he stands there, taking it all in. The glass doors Daniel walked into once when he tried to push instead of pull, the people milling about in the reception area beyond. The lively, noisy ambience of LA feels almost discordant, like a shirt that doesn't quite fit anymore. 

Somewhere behind him, across the street, a child shrieks and begins to cry, and it does something unpleasant to his stomach. That's what's missing. It's the screams. Pandemonium is full of screams. 

A woman's voice begins to soothe the crying child. She's close enough that he should be able to hear her easily, but she's just a meaningless accompaniment to the bloody buzzing noise in his head. 

He shivers. Pulls his jacket a bit tighter around him. And reaches for the chrome door handle.

* * *

He finds himself at her apartment after his fight with Michael, finds himself outside her front door and doesn't even bloody remember how he got there, and he expects to feel better when he sees her, but he  _ doesn't.  _

"Yeah," says the Detective evenly, staring holes into the kitchen countertop keeping him at arms length, tension in every line of her. "Must be, um. Terrible, not to control your own fate."

Her eyes lift to meet his, like a challenge, like he did something wrong, and something in him  _ snaps _ because he never asked for this, never asked the bloody tyrant upstairs to interfere, never asked Him to make her. He didn't even bloody  _ know _ ! Not until he'd already -

"Alright, I get it, Detective," he bites back, voice and hackles rising together. "You're struggling with feeling like you can't cope, well,  _ welcome to the bloody club!" _

He’s pretty sure the aircon in here is colder than it used to be. Didn’t he used to play Monopoly with her offspring in his shirtsleeves in this apartment? But right now it’s downright bloody frosty as she draws herself up, staring him down, voice crisp and quiet. Like when she's disciplining her bloody offspring. 

He needs a thicker jacket. 

"You have no right to yell at me," she says coldly. "Our situations are nothing alike. You -" her forefinger jabs towards his face - "are an angel. You -" and again - "deal with celestial... _ craziness _ all the time; I am just a person, Lucifer."

Which is a load of rubbish, honestly. The Detective has never been 'just' anything.

"Just a person who is already dealing with the fact that I'm in love with the devil and *then* -" her hand comes down hard against the countertop,  _ slam _ , and he nearly jumps out of his bloody skin and this is  _ wrong _ , it's all wrong between them and this is not at all how it was supposed to go and a bone-deep shiver spreads through him like the ice-cold rush of wine to the gut. "I find out that I was  _ made _ to feel that way. That my life isn't my own. So I am sorry if your brother is a jerk to you sometimes!"

He stares at her. And - fuck, he keeps staring, can't make himself move or speak or anything as she turns her back on him and starts moving dishes from the sideboard into the sink with a clatter. He feels like he's drowning. She blames him, she resents him for this and there isn't even anything he can bloody apologise for because he  _ didn't ask for any of it _ . 

Is this Dad's whole plan? To make her bloody hate him? 

_ Say something, damn you _ . 

"...I…" 

She's only a couple of feet away. He could eat up the distance between them in two short strides. But he feels like the entirety of Hell itself separates her from him right now. 

"I spent thousands of years in Hell imagining our reunion," is what he manages to get out finally,  _ bitterly _ , as he watches the back of her head and all but hears the gates of the Pit closing on his ability to connect with her. "Getting my partner back, getting...getting  _ you _ back. But now…"

Fuck, he's crying. Near as damn it, anyway. He sinks sideways onto the closest stool at her breakfast bar, clenching his fist to keep from trembling. He's so bloody cold. "I just thought it would go differently."

At the sink, she sniffs deeply, and takes in a breath like she might be crying too. Her bun nods at him. "Yeah. Me too." 

Her voice is trembling nearly as much as he is. "I thought what we had was real."

She leaves him there, puffy-eyed and steadily bruising, with Michael's blood still tacky and drying across the front of his ruined shirt, and the chill settles like ice in his chest. 

* * *

She tells him she wants space, and he tries to give it to her; leaves his phone in the corvette so he can't message her and buries himself in Daniel, Daniel and his painfully boring case files and his bloody obnoxious self-help holistic spiritual nonsense pouring out of him like a leaky tap in Lux's toilets. 

He goes home, and checks his phone, and she hasn't called.

He turns up the heating in the penthouse. 

He realises he's been staring blankly at the familiar ivory keys of his baby grand when she startles him as she slides onto the bench beside him. He didn't even hear the elevator ding.

She tells him he's choosing to be vulnerable with her, and he wonders what choice he ever had in that. She flays him alive, strips down all his defences without even trying and watches the little naked thing at the very core of him squeal and flee for cover. And then she kisses him, and he stops wondering anything at all.

* * *

There’s a little case of crime scene interruptus, because  _ of course there bloody is _ , but she keeps sneaking glances at him across the centre console as she drives, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards like she knows what he’s thinking, and the air between them is alive with something he can neither name nor ignore, something that sends delightful little frissons of energy sparking through him, like the little electrical disturbances that tell him a storm’s coming long before the human newscaster announces what stupid name they’ve given it. 

He rests his arm across the back of her seat, just below the headrest, and curls tendrils of her hair around his fingers, and basks in the one divinity that will never get old; that she knows the truth of him, and she wants him anyway. 

Her cruiser glides to a stop at a red light and she shifts to rest her closest hand on his thigh, thumb stroking back and forth across the expensive fabric. It’s a casual, relaxed gesture, and he has to resist the urge to freeze, to hold his breath in case he does something to scare her off. But his free hand goes to hers like it’s pulled by a magnet, and he laces their fingers together, faintly aware that he’s giving her a stupid smile across the handbrake. 

“Cold?” she asks, flicking a glance at her rearview mirror as the lights turn to amber and then to green, and as she pulls away she frees her hand from his to turn on the heating. “You don’t normally get cold. Are you sick?”

She  _ cares _ , and it turns out that stupid bloody cliché about butterflies in the stomach might’ve had a point all these years. He might owe a few writers in Hell an apology. “Just adjusting.” 

The Detective signals to change lanes and merges in front of an ugly yellow Prius. “Is it hot, then? In Hell, I mean. Like, really?”

He watches her face out of the corner of his eye. She hasn’t tried to talk about Hell since that time she asked him if he  _ ate children _ . “...Yes?”

“Hotter than LA?” 

“Much.”

“Huh.” She’s quiet for a moment, and her hand lands back on his thigh. “Like what, Arizona?”

“Worse.”

She laughs. “Africa?”

He takes his cue from her, and tentatively laughs too. It doesn’t sound as nervous as he feels. He’d gotten rather out of practice during his last extended vacation, with being unflappable and all. He’s better at it now. Thousands of years in the Pit tends to do that to a devil. “Worse.”

The Detective chews on her lip, eyes on the road. She signals to turn off the freeway, and misses a perfect opportunity to swear out the window at some imbecile in a four-by-four that almost clips the wing mirror off the cruiser as he cuts in front. She gives his hand a lingering squeeze. “I’m glad you’re not there anymore, Lucifer.”

Sometimes, she hurts him. And not in a way he understands. “Me too, Detective.”

* * *

But then she tells her absolute dildo of an ex - a  _ DJ _ , for crying out loud - that she's not seeing anyone, and that...well, that hurts him in a way he’s intimately familiar with. DJ Dickwad -  _ Karnal _ , honestly, Wolfgang would be rolling in his bloody grave if he heard what this moron calls music - shoulders between them and makes pathetic bloody puppy eyes at her and calls her  _ Cherry Jane _ , and ugh, at least  _ Detective _ isn’t so bloody  _ diminutive _ . 

And every time she laughs at DJ Dickwad’s jokes he feels her slip further and further away from him and back towards the arms of a past that’s easy, where she isn’t a miracle and her boyfriend isn’t the devil, where she doesn’t have to second guess whether every decision she’s ever made was planned in advance by a sociopathic tyrant in another dimension. 

He can’t say he blames her. 

* * *

“Stop asking for everyone’s advice and  _ go talk to her _ ,” says Daniel, and the end of days are clearly upon him because he’s taking advice from  _ Detective Douche _ , of all people, with his inspirational posters and his chakras and his bloody holistic healing bollocks. 

He’s already left Amenadiel with his leaky baby nephew finally sleeping -  _ why do humans like to have those things _ , he will never understand it - when he remembers he chucked his phone out the window. 

Because DJ Dickwad told him he should be mysterious. Pfft. Ridiculous. 

Still, no harm done. He can easily get a new one. 

He’s not so chilly anymore with Hellfire in his veins. Because Amenadiel’s spawn -  _ Charlie _ \- for some utterly nonsensical reason, seems to enjoy his other face. He’d even tried to shove a chubby finger in Lucifer’s eye at one point, and patted his scarred cheeks, and Amenadiel had said  _ well done, brother _ with his arm around his shoulder and he’d sounded  _ proud _ and - 

He turns off the central heating, and rolls down the windows a little. 

* * *

He wakes in the dark, with the dim digital clock display on his phone's sleep screen reading 4.15am. 

The penthouse is quiet, the traffic and laughter from the city below just a muted buzz from this high up. The rumpled silk sheets are pushed down around his hips, the cool night air raising gooseflesh across his bare back. He's lying on his belly with his face smushed into the pillows, and beyond the translucent black curtains darkening his bedroom the lights of sleepless LA twinkle merrily at him like so many stars. 

"Mmm."

He stiffens instinctively at the unexpected sound from behind him, jolting into survival mode as his brain shrieks  _ danger danger danger,  _ only to stall and shudder to a halt as the Detective mumbles, "Lucifer."

Her hand comes patting across the bed from her side - and that's a nice thought, her having a side of his bed, because they sleep together now, apparently - until it finds the sharp line of his hip. She pats a little farther and - 

\- gives his arse a sleepy squeeze. He chokes on a laugh. If nothing else, it’s a balm to his ego that he’s not the only one that’s been bloody gagging for it for years of pointless dancing around. Although he’s definitely racked up a few thousand more of those than she has. 

He feels her weight shift, pressing up against his side from shoulder to thigh, and she flings one leg over his with a drowsy grunt. She's still wearing his shirt, the one she borrowed when he made her eggs between the second round and the third, and she wraps her arm around his waist as she noses into his shoulder, resettling. "Still cold?"

He catches her hand, brings it to his lips and kisses her knuckles. Wants to brand her care for him into his own skin, to preserve this feeling forever. He turns his head to face her, and she nuzzles in under his chin, yawning against his collarbone. "Not anymore, Detective."

She extricates her hand to pull the sheets back up before it comes to rest at the nape of his neck, fingers tangling gently into his hair. His chest aches at the tenderness of the gesture. She strokes lightly through his curls, slow, already soothing herself back to sleep with the rhythm. "Good."

He feels her press a kiss to his shoulder as she curls around him. 

And for the first time since leaving the intense heat of his abandoned kingdom, he feels truly warm. 

  
  
  



End file.
